# Chapter 50: The Inevitable End
Within the bodies of all Evil Gods reside the memories of all life and souls from their original worlds and civilizations. In a sense, the existence of an Evil God itself can even be regarded as the continuation of the world that was destroyed—because all information, all history and the past, are wrapped within the Evil God's body, becoming its power.
And now, the nameless Evil God emitted a sound.
If there is any sound that evokes the most helplessness, it must be the sighs and sobs of all living beings facing inevitable annihilation before a civilization's destruction. They are powerless, they cannot turn the tide, because before the end arrives, all banners and heroes have been broken. When the world collapses and crumbles, no one remains to bear the heavens.
So they can only sigh.
What can evoke even greater helplessness than this is the destruction of two civilizations.
Or three, four, ten, a hundred.
Or perhaps, countless.
At this moment, Joshua was listening to the sorrowful sounds of nearly countless worlds.
The voice of an Evil God cannot be heard by ordinary people, much like the existence of the Steel Serpent. Without reaching the Legendary realm, one lacks even the qualification to glimpse its form of existence. Even for a warrior, without the authority of the Soulflame King passed down by the Sage, being merely an ordinary Soulflame user or common person, one cannot see the Steel Serpent before advancing to Legendary and developing the Steel Vision observation method.
But now, this overly keen and powerful observation ability had become the trigger that overwhelmed Joshua's resistance.
Wrapped in chaos, the warrior instantly heard the weeping sounds of thousands upon thousands, nearly countless worlds that had already perished.
He felt his will slowly sinking into a vast chaos. The nameless Evil God—or rather, the wreckage of countless destroyed worlds—whose awakening had been interrupted and whose condensation nucleus had been shattered, instinctively used this method to try to erode and assimilate this silver 'world'.
Endless memories flooded in.
Joshua saw the memories of all living beings who had existed in countless worlds before their destruction.
Dim flames blazed fiercely atop corpses and remains, black shadows spreading toward the distance along with despair.
...
The sun was obscured by black smoke from burning cities, the sky dark and gloomy. Due to the limitless use of 'Forbidden'-level supreme alchemy, the entire world was on the verge of destruction.
Cities and mountains were reduced to ash by disintegration magic, then hurled into the sky by flame beams seemingly from hell itself. In the wars among 'Grand Alchemists' vying for control of the world, even the material distribution of the world was altered. Cracks split open in the earth, flames from the planet's core were extracted by enormous magical-mechanical devices to attack floating cities suspended in smog and acid rain. Titan colossi standing as tall as mountains hurled crust and peaks at each other, triggering earthquakes to destroy enemy positions.
Life was merely numbers, population was just resources. The Grand Alchemists, who believed themselves to hold the truth and never regarded ordinary people as their equals, had never cared about the survival of any common person from the very beginning of their wars, nor about the destruction inflicted upon the world. They believed that the victor of the war could naturally restore all damaged environments to their original state. Even if ordinary people and living creatures were exterminated, their cloning technology could reshape a brand new, beautiful world.
Because they believed they possessed the power to restore all things, the wars of the Grand Alchemists completely lost all restraint. They manufactured poison gas, spread plagues, shattered the moon, created meteors. Some madmen even planned to detonate the planet's core while hiding in the vacuum of space, thereby eliminating all their opponents.
But they underestimated their own madness and overestimated the world's capacity to endure.
On the eve of the world's destruction, the flames at the planet's core gradually extinguished, the cycle of all things was severed, and the world barrier began to slowly shatter. The Grand Alchemists, finally awakened from their madness upon realizing this, found that everything was already too late. Even if they possessed the power and technology to repair the world, they no longer had the time.
In this dark age, on a world approaching its end, in a ruined city hidden near the polar region, a small boy and a girl who had lost her right leg sat before a dying campfire, trembling as they leaned against each other. They were not siblings, had no blood relation—just a homeless child who had lost his parents and another orphan left alone by war.
They did not know the world was about to end, nor what final struggles the Grand Alchemists were making. They only knew that winter was coming, food was severely insufficient, and even the campfire before them could not be relit due to lack of firewood. The boy had already made his decision: he would leave the remaining food for the girl, while he ventured into dangerous war zones to search for possible supplies.
This act was extremely dangerous, practically a death sentence, but there was simply no other choice—only the difference between dying sooner or later. Both knew that this farewell would be their last.
And so, they embraced and wept. Not out of despair, nor fear of death. They wept simply out of sorrow, because this world was so cold that it would not even allow two lonely souls to depend on each other.
Perhaps the only thing worth being grateful for was that before the boy and girl could say their goodbyes, the world's barrier shattered completely.
All things returned to darkness.
...
In a world without any supernatural power, a vast world government governed the entire planet. The unification war three hundred years ago had been this civilization's final conflict; since then, there had been eternal peace.
This world's technology was not exceptionally advanced, but it was already capable of reshaping heaven and earth, obtaining nearly infinite resources for civilization. Whether sky, sea, or land, whether economy or entertainment, information or work—everything was under the central government's jurisdiction. From birth to death, growth, education, friendship, marriage, childbirth, work, death—every single aspect of an individual's life fell within the central government's management.
The entire world had even been restructured into several zones: agricultural zones for food production, mining zones for resource extraction, urban zones for housing and living, and industrial zones. These four major zones operated separately, and residents of any given zone might never visit another zone in their entire lives.
Because they had been educated this way since childhood, no one thought anything was wrong with this arrangement. After all, regardless of which zone one lived in, individuals could still enjoy friendship and family, had means of entertainment and opportunities for relaxation. The central government, unless necessary, did not forcibly interfere with any individual's life. They even had the right to vacation and live in other zones—it was just unnecessary. They did not understand, so they did not yearn for it, nor were they curious.
It was merely an overly strict system of order; in essence, there was nothing wrong with it.
Until one day, through calculations by the central think tank, the central government discovered that their overly small world, even using extreme measures, could only sustain 55 billion individuals simultaneously. And this number, before their exponentially growing population, was something that could be reached in just over a decade.
To prolong, or rather, to avoid the moment when the world would be burst at the seams, the central government launched a large-scale population control operation. Some overly densely populated areas implemented policies prohibiting childbirth, while other regions enacted mild birth control measures.
Through drugs, forced sterilization, propaganda about the harms of overpopulation, and segregating male and female individuals by region—ensuring only one gender existed in a given area—the central government successfully controlled their population growth trend, finally causing the nearly 70-degree upward slope of population growth to experience a decline. With the central government's grip on grassroots control, they could ensure that not a single newborn would be born worldwide in the year the plan began.
The control was successful. Even too successful.
So successful that even they could not manage it.
Nearly a decade later, when the population had gradually declined close to the safety threshold, the central government decided to temporarily lift population controls and revive the birth plan. But even a perfect plan has loopholes due to its executors. The central government had calculated that the elderly demographic would have lower fertility rates, that individuals who had never seen the opposite sex would be unable to mate and reproduce normally. They had anticipated various problems from all angles. But what they had not anticipated was that, due to the overly successful population control propaganda, nearly all individuals had developed an instinctive aversion and disgust toward reproduction.
Childbirth was never a joyful thing. Whether it was raising offspring, nurturing young, or the act of giving birth itself for female individuals—it was all very hard work, requiring tremendous sacrifice with possibly no return at all. If not for the force of habit—being accustomed to, upon reaching adulthood, being arranged by the central government to meet with an individual of the opposite sex for marriage—many individuals might have chosen not to have offspring even without any propaganda.
When society's direction shifted, and the central government, which believed it could control everything, realized that population control had spiraled out of control and that newborn numbers had fallen far below the critical danger line, everything was already too late.
Even by distributing aphrodisiac hormones, developing various drugs that could enhance pleasure and reduce the pain of childbirth, offering government bonuses, and subsidizing childbirth with money, the population growth rate could no longer be raised. As the older generation died off in large numbers, the newborns—only a fraction of the previous generation's numbers—had just reached adulthood. Even if they realized they must reproduce as much as possible, civilization would collapse before the new generation could grow up.
One could see that, as the older generation withered away, the entire world gradually fell into silence.
Giant factories as tall as mountains, like beehives, shut down due to lack of operation. Super-enterprises requiring 30,000 employees to function could not sustain themselves. Even transporting raw materials from the mining zone required tens of thousands of transport workers working three shifts around the clock. The production lines for goods had even developed errors due to being idle for too long without full-power operation. But by then, even maintenance technicians no longer existed.
On the vast plains of cultivation, crops grew wildly. Fields that once required at least a hundred households working together with large harvesters for over ten days stood empty. These crops went unharvested, rotting in the fields. But what would harvesting accomplish? The food rough-processing and fine-processing factories had already stopped operating. Due to highly specialized roles, farmers who only knew how to plant crops and transport them had no ability to process food.
The once-crowded urban beehives had long become ghost towns. Walking seven or eight streets, one might not see a single living person. And if one did, one had to be wary of whether they harbored malicious intent. In this massive urban zone, resources were limited. Without transfusion from agricultural and industrial zones, the super-megacity had not stockpiled much daily-use supplies. In this era, even survival was a huge problem, let alone having enough to eat.
Population was the foundation of civilization, the most basic unit of production. Without population, nothing existed.
Decades later, the large energy base in the industrial zone leaked due to lack of maintenance, causing a violent explosion that affected the atmosphere. Soon after, more energy bases developed various problems from neglect—leaks, explosions. Radiation pollution began to spread across the globe.
Decades later, a violent volcanic shift destroyed the ruins of a super-large city, and the sun's orbit happened to align at the right trajectory. A mini ice age arrived.
Another few decades passed.
Perhaps the last individual of this civilization was about to die.
This old man, who had grown up alone, lived alone, and watched over the world alone, sat in his small wooden cabin, staring blankly at his parents' portraits. Due to radiation pollution, they had only had one child, and they had warned their offspring to find another individual of the opposite sex so that they could reproduce. But the old man had spent his entire life without finding any other individual besides his parents.
Before death came, he began to cry. Not because of the inevitable aging and death, but out of sorrow, because he could not feel any warmth, because of the loneliness where even language could not be used.
In absolute silence, the lifeless world slowly moved toward destruction.
...
Destroyed by war. Destroyed by systems.
Destroyed by technological development. Destroyed by hitting bottlenecks.
Destroyed by natural disasters. Destroyed by climate change.
Joshua's spirit sank into chaos. He could see the scenes of one world and civilization after another being destroyed. He could hear, again and again, sorrowful weeping. The tears of civilizations were not shed out of fear or destruction. Their sorrow lay in the fact that none of this was absolute.
They clearly had many more and better possibilities, yet they had walked down this seemingly narrow path—one that, for them, was an inevitable end.